Media Centers

Creating and developping resource centers about contemporary France and the French-speaking world is one of the 3 missions of the Alliance Française. Wherever they are located, French media centers become a hub for Francophiles, learners of French, advanced French-speakers or French expatriates. They offer a place where one can find information and entertainment and they provide educational materials for young learners and learning tools for students of all ages.

Catching on to the fast evolution of information-communication technologies, what used to be 'Alliance Française libraries' progressively became media centers meant to record and make available audivisual documents. A second 'revolution' leads them now into an all-digital era, as proven by the Virtual Library of the Alliance Française (Project Benjamin, FIAF de New York) or the numerous intiatives taken in local chapters to make index browsing and document orders available on line.

The Multimedia Resource Center of the Alliance Française de Paris in itself sums-up the modern thinking on information management ; designed to fully integrate new technologies as well as FLS learning and teaching needs, the MRC exemplifies the model of a media center becoming the keystone of the Frech cultural and linguistic action.